A Nov. 1, 1992, file photo of Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia performing in California. AP Images On August 9, 1995, the Grateful Dead brought one of the biggest sources of information on Wall Street to a stop.

On this day, Grateful Dead lead guitarist Jerry Garcia was found dead of a heart attack. While it certainly stopped many fans in their tracks, it also seized up the Bloomberg Terminal, one of the most important tools on Wall Street.

The terminal, the ubiquitous and essential source of information for bankers and traders, sent an alert informing clients of Garcia's death. The service had been distributing nonfinancial news for a short time, but the alert evidently brought down the terminal.

According to Reddit user Mercury_NYC, who claimed to have worked at Bloomberg's news division at the time (full disclosure: Business Insider competes directly with Bloomberg's news service), the alert attracted so much attention that it brought down the whole service.

"When someone clicks on the news, it directs the screen to something akin to a webpage. Much like the 'reddit hug' we often see here — if too many people click the same link it overloads the system.

"Up until this point we had minor blips, issues, outages because in 1995 we were in the midst of becoming a big player in the news market, and our terminal news was just starting.

"The ticker read 'JERRY GARCIA DEAD AT 53' in all caps. Well, so many Bloomberg users clicked that link it not only stopped the news to that link...it took out our entire news feed."

While we were unable to verify that Mercury_NYC worked at Bloomberg at the time, a Los Angeles Times report referenced in the post from August 10, 1995, supports the claim of the terminal outage.

"News of Garcia's death Wednesday morning also shot through the intricate weaves of cyberspace, where the band has a high profile," the report reads. "So many Wall Street professionals called up the news on Bloomberg news service terminals that the system froze briefly around noon."

Jon Friedman, a former writer at Bloomberg, MarketWatch, and Indiewire, also wrote in 2014 that Garcia's death was one of only two times that the terminal's news service crashed due to an overwhelming story.

In an email to Business Insider following the publication of this story, a former consultant who was working with Bloomberg at the time said they remembered it slightly differently.

According to the former consultant, it was actually the third time the service had gone haywire due to a headline, the first two being Ross Perot's decision to drop out of the presidential race in 1992 and a story on the John Wayne Bobbit incident in 1993 (be advised if you're Googling the latter, the incident is not safe for work).

Garcia was 53 at the time of his death, which, despite the psychedelic rock legend's struggles with drug addiction and his weight, meant that many fans — and, evidently, Wall Street traders — were taken aback by the news.

"At our call center we had a queue monitor to tell us how many people were waiting on the phone. It went from 10 in queue...to 50...to 100...to 500...then 999....and froze on 999. Our office was, in a word, in chaos.

"This was when Bloomberg maybe had 100-200 employees working at 499 Park Avenue, and the 'customer service desk' was about 20 people between the ages of 22-28.

"We had to keep answering the phone, explain that our entire news feed was down because of Jerry Garcia, take a name and number to call the customer back to let them know when it would be back up."

It's unclear whether the overloaded system also brought down the raw financial data that the terminal offered, but even losing the real-time news feed would be a huge disruption for many on Wall Street.

According to Mercury_NYC, the feed was down for roughly 20 minutes before being rebooted, but as the Reddit user put it, "in Wall Street world that is a lifetime."

An odd, sad quirk of history.

(Worked at Bloomberg or on Wall Street in 1995? Remember the outage? Tell us your story in an email to bbryan@businessinsider.com)